Rising role of phenotypic plasticity explains changes in avian body size distributions

Natural selection overwhelmingly favours the largest within animal species. Why average body sizes in the world’s temperate birds have declined is therefore both mechanistically confusing and ecologically worrying. We argue that understanding the causes of these declines requires knowledge of how complete, body mass probability distributions are moving across space and time. Using data from 159 North American bird species – spanning 26 families, 53 degrees of latitude, and 25 years of observation since the early 1990s – we show that body mass distributions are not only downgrading, but also becoming narrower, and rapidly losing their upper tails (i.e. the largest individuals), with the most dramatic changes occurring at species’ southern range limits. Combining fitness modelling with a novel, distributional variant of the Price equation revealed that these changes are increasingly explained by phenotypic plasticity and not poleward range-shifts, or selection for or against certain body masses within species. Growing contributions of genetic drift are also dismissed. Together, these results show that disproportionate losses of the largest body sizes best explain declining averages within species, and that these losses may well be reversible. Diminishing resource accessibility from rising breeding season temperatures, particularly at lower range limits, are most consistent with these findings.